October 2014

October 31, 2014

I wrote the following piece for The Indian Diaspora. It was also distributed on the IANS wire.

By Mayank Chhaya

There was once a time, not too long ago in historical terms, that there may not have been India as it exists today but a fractious collection of nearly 600 princely states. If a nation-state called India emerged in 1947 from the staggering ruins of close to 200 years of colonial plunder, to a significant extent the credit settles on one man - Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Described by The New York Times as "leather tough", Patel, whose 139th birth anniversary is celebrated today, is in the midst of a major national revival. For someone on whom fell the enormous task of nation-building and political regeneration, Patel has for decades remained in the towering shadows of Mohandas Gandhi on the one hand and Jawaharlal Nehru on the other, "the father of the nation" and the first prime minister respectively of India.

In recent years, there has been growing popular awareness and eminently justifiable celebration of the defining role that Patel played in bringing together sometimes vain, sometimes egotistic, sometimes deluded and almost always utterly self-absorbed rulers of 565 princely states to join the Indian union. A country of some 300 million in 1947, impoverished by two centuries of brutal colonial exploitation and torn asunder by religious and cultural bloodletting, it needed the quietly firm and unassailable resolve of Patel to re-emerge. Patel had to use a combination of statecraft, flattery, coercion and whatever else he was required to muster to forge a nation-state out of what by the time the colonial British rule ended in India was, for want of a better word, a bloody mess.

Vallabhbhai Patel was an extraordinary figure sandwiched between Gandhi's lofty stubbornness and Nehru's urbane western-influenced liberalism. Although closer in age to Gandhi (he was six years younger than Gandhi), for many history has cast Patel as an implacable adversary of Nehru, who was 14 years his junior. There is really no comparable figure in modern world history to Patel simply because there has not been anyone anywhere who was at the center of uniting an undefined geographical entity claimed in pieces by 565 self-serving princes, satraps and kings whose loyalties swung between their self-aggrandizement and crafty but obliging colonial masters.

Born in Nadiad in Gujarat, Patel's early education was split between three nearby towns of Nadiad, Petlad and Borsad. It was his early exposure to an unsettled life to which his tough, no nonsense and in some ways even dour demeanour may be attributed. He rose to study law in London, topping his class at the Middle Temple Inn. On his return to India he chose to practice law in Ahmedabad and became a top barrister.

It was Gandhi's return from South Africa and his extensive tours throughout India rallying the people around the cause of independence that drew Patel into public life. Eventually, he forsook his Britain-influenced lifestyle, including English clothes, for a wholly Indian outlook as defined by Gandhi. Early on, Gandhi saw in Patel a quietly steely resolve and the eagerness to get down to the task of firing up the grassroots. His rise as one of a handful of luminaries of India's independence movement was not necessarily meteoric but steady and solid.

It was a measure of Patel's personality that both Gandhi and Nehru had extremely high praise for him despite the fact that he often diverged from the former's saintly renunciation and the latter's aristocratic urgency. Gandhi called him a colleague who was "most trustworthy, staunch and brave", while Nehru called him "the builder and consolidator of India...a great captain of our forces in the struggle for freedom...a tower of strength that revived wavering hearts". By all accounts, Patel was an equal member of the Gandhi-Nehru-Patel triumvirate in his lifetime unlike the often unfounded assertions to the contrary by new generations of politically dogmatic Indians.

There have been frequent speculations about how different India might have turned out had Gandhi chosen Patel over Nehru to be India's first prime minister but many historians have pointed out that being a near contemporary of Gandhi, he never really saw himself in that role. By the time India became independent and a union of states, the latter thanks in very large measure to Patel, he was already 72 years old compared to Nehru's 58. Patel died Dec 15, 1950, barely a year after it became an independent republic by adopting a constitution Jan 26. Patel was among key players in the Constituent Assembly of India tasked with framing the constitution. If of all the illustrious leaders of the day, there was someone who was a completely hands-on, nuts and bolts figure, it was Patel.

Although Patel was very much in the tradition of pre-independence open-minded consensus man, his views on the formation of Pakistan, the division of Kashmir and generally the question of how to unify the country's Muslim minority were at serious variance with a disillusioned Gandhi and impatient Nehru. Patel was known have taken a characteristically unemotional view of the country's partition and, unlike Nehru, who was for a collective national effort to make Muslims want to stay in India, Patel was in favor of leaving it to individual choice.

It was this approach that has in recent years particularly endeared him to India's political right symbolized by the now ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its several cultural offshoots. Even before he became prime minister, Narendra Modi, as the chief minister of Gujarat state, had cleared plans to build a 597 feet high statue of Vallabhbhai Patel at the cost of close to $500 million. The construction of the statue is scheduled to begin to coincide with the leader's birth anniversary today.

Although he was deputy prime minister and home minister, Patel was by a wide consensus the man who was involved in every aspect of nation-building. As someone who chaired committees dealing with the rights of the minorities and tribes, fundamental rights and provincial constitutions, Patel was at the very heart of creating a nation-state that is now the world's largest democracy. If Nehru was the articulator of a grand vision of India as a new democracy, Patel was the executor of that idea from so many different and often conflicting vantage points.

He was unflinchingly loyal to Gandhi, often at the expense of his own ideas of operative politics. It was that loyalty to Gandhi's idea of India that Patel, despite his enormous and, in many ways, greater capabilities than Nehru that he chose the role as a behind-the-scenes man. His forging of the Indian union alone guarantees him a permanent position among the country's pantheon but he also happens to have shaped India's destiny in so many diverse but quantifiable ways that he remains without peer.

October 30, 2014

This morning while reading an interview/profile of director Christopher Nolan in The New York Times, I started painting the four paintings above. The place looks like Earth but in my mind it is supposed to be in another galaxy altogether.

Their version of sunrise begins quite like us but then goes through a spectacular cycle of neon bands throughout the day. Their sun never really rises but merely changes colors. Also, the planet certainly has no human-like creatures who write such useless posts.

October 29, 2014

The versatility of glass as an art medium has been known since at least the third millennium BCE. Cultures throughout the world have created an astonishing variety of glass art. This morning on my routine visit to the Google Art Project, I decided to visit the Hakone Glass Forest Venetian Glass Museum. Inevitably, I was rewarded with some breathtaking works. Although what I have showcased here is not that old, it shows just how versatile glass is as a medium of artistic expression. The examples I have cited here are all unknown in terms of their makers and that shows how the expression is inevitably more enduring than the expresser. Ironic but true.

Each of these works is exquisite and a tribute to its makers’ astounding skills. I have chosen not to say much about them because their artistry speaks for itself. It does not need an intermediary. If you have a few moments, I recommend you visit the URL that I have linked to the word Hakone here.

October 28, 2014

I am a fan of my dreams. Many of them seem only borderline improbable in real life, meaning they could happen in real life. Take the one that I experienced this morning soon after 3.45 a.m. It would not have lasted more than 30 seconds in actuality but by the time I woke up after watching it fully, it was 5.10 a.m. I don’t know how the time computes in dreams but that is a subject for discussion another day.

The dream began on a wide, dust-laden asphalt street of an obscure town which could have been in Gujarat because I heard some people speaking Gujarati. The houses on either side of the street were in various stages of incompletion as if their owners had run out of money midway through their construction. Many of them had exposed bricks and uneven concrete, not as in deliberately shabby aesthetics but as in “I do not have the money to finish the plastering.”

I was standing in the middle of that street for no apparent reason and peering into the horizon. That is when I saw brownish yellow clouds clouds of dust rise from the ground. It was a herd of cows with massive horns running towards me. As the cows came closer, I stepped aside and waited inside the compound of one of the homes whose wrought iron gate had partly come off the hinges. The air displaced by the cows running made the gate swing and squeak. The cows passed me by very rapidly. If I had remained standing in the middle of the street I would have been trampled to death in my dream.

After the cows passed, I went back again and stood in the street looking for more animal herds. This time there were camels whose head weirdly looked like dinosaurs. They were silvery white and because of their size they seemed to be lumbering across even though they were running faster than the cows. They passed as well.

I went back to the street again. In my dream, I seemed to know the exact time of the great scramble. The third set of animals was buffaloes but were they really buffaloes? From a distance, they were clearly buffaloes.However, as they came closer they morphed into blackbuck antelopes. Unlike the cows and camel/dinosaurs, whose hard hooves stomped and shook the ground, the antelopes had the lightness of ballerinas. They made no noise, nor kick up any dust. I remained in the middle of the street and they negotiated past me without stampeding me to death.

The blackbuck antelopes passed, leaving behind them a brisk of burst of air that woke me up. The time was 5.10 a.m. I folded my comforter, came down to brush my teeth etc., quickly drew the illustration above and wrote this wholly unnecessary post.

October 27, 2014

Spoiler Alert: Don’t read if you have not watched Homeland’s latest episode “About a Boy” broadcast on October 26.

Actor Suraj Sharma’s ‘Homeland’ character Aayan Ibrahim got fully seduced last night by Claire Danes’ character Carrie Mathison. There was a trajectory to both their kiss in the previous episode and Carrie’s plot to recruit him that meant that the two had to have sex.

In my post on October 20 I wrote: “The makers have already given it a certain direction by having Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) begin his seduction as part of a ploy. The two kissed last night and the age difference of 14 years between Sharma’s 21 to Danes’ 35 was bridged by latter’s rather seasoned performance. Sharma was required to look nervous, unsure and yet willing all at the same time and he did that very well.”

I then suspected that there would be some minor disquiet among ‘Homeland’s devout followers over the seduction of a boyish looking Aayan, who is a medical student. I found some of that reflected (I presume in a faux tone of concern) this morning while reading Judith Warner’s recap/review of last night’s episode in The New York Times. The headline to the review sets the mood by asking “Are you finding Carrie a little creepy?”

“It’s a good thing that Aayan, nephew of the wanted terrorist Haissam Haqqani has a full chest of hair. It provided at least some visual reassurance that Carrie was not, all behavioral evidence to the contrary, seducing a minor, and that we viewers were not, by extension, complicit in a sex crime,” Warner writes.

She also adds this as if to extenuate the seduction of the boyish Aayan: “For peace of mind, I found myself pausing the episode to look up the actor Suraj Sharma’s age. He is 21.”

I had already referred to Sharma’s and Danes’ ages in real life last week but that is neither here nor there in so much their real ages have any bearing on their television ages. The passionate viewers of ‘Homeland’ need not draw any reassurance that Sharma is 21 for the simple reason that his character could still be a minor in the television series. I doubt that because for someone to be a medical student in Pakistan or elsewhere in South Asia they have to have graduated from high school which would generally put them past the age consent unless they are all Doogie Howsers, in which case we could indeed be by extension complicit in a sex crime if watching fiction constitutes a crime.

The morning after their night of awkward love-making, the director has Aayan somewhat surreptitiously lift the sheet and peer at Carrie’s nether regions. Without the context that follows, this might have seemed “creepy” but the makers make sure that the CIA station chief’s baby is mentioned and hence the C-section and hence Aayan’s curiosity and because he is a medical student, hence his understanding of the cut. Too many “hences”.

One of the main reasons why I write about popular television shows or movies or things that are trending on the Net is because they get me some extra readers searching those keywords. I don’t give a flying fuck (even a non-flying fuck) whether Carrie seduces Aayan and whether they climax together. People forget that it is just fiction like the rest of the universe we live in.

October 26, 2014

I read any written material first and sometimes only from a stylistic point of view. The test of the written word has to be its readability first and then its substance.

Being sure of my worldview, such as it, I do not feel threatened or menaced or discommoded or enraged by others’ take on any subject no matter how controversial it is.This has been my general philosophy while reading anything. The least the writer can do is serve something that is readable.

It is from this angle that I approach Pankaj Mishra’s rather unhappy view of the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and what it can potentially do or is already doing to upend the political, cultural, historical and religious arrangements in the country. His general thesis seems to be that Modi and the kind of assertively Hindu cultural awakening he represents is fraught with grave consequences.

In a telling and portentous warning Mishra writes, “Largely subterranean until it erupts, this ressentiment of the West among thwarted elites can assume a more treacherous form than the simple hatred and rejectionism of outfits such as Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Taliban. The intellectual history of right-wing Russian and Japanese nationalism reveals an ominously similar pattern as the vengeful nativism of Hindu nationalists: a recoil from craving Western approval into promoting religious-racial supremacy.”

Here is what I mean when I say that I read any written material from a stylistic point of view. While reading this particular passage, which is obviously provocative, my attention was more focused on the expression “thwarted elites”. It is a memorable way to describe how in Mishra’s view India’s elites simultaneously harbor envy and admiration for the West. The reason why I gravitate toward style rather than substance is because by temperament and by intellectual necessity I am superficial. I approach any content, be it cinema, literature, music or painting, primarily as a means to be engaged and entertained/compelled.

With that out of the way, a couple of observations about Mishra’s piece. As is his wont, he marshals a diversity of global historical references, most of which would be lost on the shallow, attention-challenged, intellectually fractured Internet tribe, to make his case. Unless you spend your time as a research scholar scouring world literature for powerful references, you are unlikely to be able to challenge Mishra’s scholarship. Even if you do manage to do precisely that it eventually comes down to how you connect broad trends and discern a pattern. It is about individual interpretation.

He talks about comparable “thwarted elites” in Russia and Japan who, he says, also did something that the Indian elites, bolstered by Narendra Modi’s rise, may now be doing, namely “to match Western power through both mimicry and collaboration..” (There, “through mimicry and collaboration”, another telling expression).

Mishra’s assertion that “ressentiment” of “thwarted elites” in India can become more treacherous than “the simple hatred and rejectionism of outfits such as Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Taliban” is ballsy and yet demonstrably wrong. He both overestimates the ability of the Indian elites to mount a global project to establish Indian/Hindu supremacy and underestimates the inhibiting power of India’s internal fractures and discontents to prevent it.

In a country where as of 2012, 360 million officially lived below the poverty line and more than twice that number unofficially, the kind of concerted effort required to become all that Mishra says India could become under Modi is simply not possible. The elites certainly can and may try but the prospects of its success are dim at best.

There is a reason why it is called an elite. It is necessarily small in number and therefore eventually incapable of realizing many of its thwarted dreams. The problem with the kind of analysis scholars such as Mishra offer is that they presume an element of fiendishly meticulous planning behind the emergence of figures such as Modi. While there is certainly some of that for sure, he is still subject to and vulnerable to all the enormous uncertainties of a political system that exists in India.

I do not subscribe to the rather popular view that Mishra and those who share his vision are propelled by a peculiar kind of self-loathing and India/Hindu phobia. That is non-sense and embarrassing. That said, I am never sure what it is that would make them even grudgingly appreciative of some of the strengths that India as a civilization that is very old and a nation-state that is very young has consistently displayed. After all, there ought to be something that glues together over 1.2 billion people who speak 22 languages and close to 1700 dialects, practice six major religions and countless other sects and live across wildly varying economic achievement without generally killing one another. That something cannot be just a delusional vision created by the country’s “thwarted elites.”

There is also that little detail that Prime Minister Modi has emerged on the strength of a predominantly fair electoral victory which has given him the first clear parliamentary majority in 30 years. Notwithstanding that his Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) vote share was a niggardly 31% makes it the lowest to win a majority, it still managed to get a majority 282 seats. In fact, the vote share is instructive because it is an indicator that only 31% of the Indian electorate subscribe to the BJP’s and therefore Modi’s ideology enough to vote him into office. While this may not necessarily stop India from becoming the kind of place which, according to Mishra, is more treacherous than “the simple hatred and rejectionism of outfits such as Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Taliban”, it will certainly not speed it up.

I feel no particular necessity to defend India or, for that matter, any great civilization because that is generally a futile endeavor. I take a detached view of the world and treat it with a transient curiosity because I can never lose the perspective about how we are so insignificant in the cosmic scheme of things that we do not even qualify to be insignificant.

October 25, 2014

This morning I was planning to report the way my mind jumps from consuming one media to the next and leaping from one sensory indulgence to the next. Some day I intend to do that in greater detail but for now it is sufficient to give you a glimpse of what I mean.

I began the morning reading Pankaj Mishra’s op-ed in The New York Times titled ‘Modi’s Idea of India’ in which in so much as I could understand his underlying theme is how Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rise also marks the reemergence of the assertive Hindu cultural revivalism. I could be wrong in my distillation but that could be easily explained by my general failure comprehend much about the human race.

Even as I finished reading it I began thinking about how a depiction of the Fall colors in a painting that I did yesterday (below) originally changed into a very different vision (above). In the original work, I was going for how the advent of Fall mimics the colors of fire. Fall makes flora look aflame.That is why the original painting looks like, as separately pointed out by friends Tina Verghese Clark and Chintan Oza, a wildfire. They are right but that was not what I had in mind.

Prompted by their observation I began reworking the original by erasing nearly 50 percent and giving it the blue backdrop of a Fall sky. I then added a few birds and stuck the moon in the left hand corner. With those changes the final painting has a much calmer and more optimistic personality.

That was the second part of my sensory indulgence.

While I was thinking about it I was also browsing the net where I came upon an entertaining session at the just concluded Mumbai Film Festival. It featured a discussion around ‘Parinda’, a 1989 Hindi movie made by Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Even as I was watching the session conducted by filmmaker Anurag Kashyap, for no apparent reason I began singing “Chaman mein rang-e-bahar utara” by Ghulam Ali. I had no choice but to open a fourth tab on Chrome and play that on YouTube.

From Pankaj Mishra’s characteristically scholarly op-ed to my Fall series to ‘Parinda (The Bird)’ to Ghulam Ali’s ‘Chaman” it betrays a mind that never really settles down. The Internet is at the heart of it all because almost everything now is just a question of opening a new tab on the browser.

I think I may have unexpectedly nailed the cause of my frequent migraine attacks. It is irrational media consumption.

P.S.: I even noticed that in the URL to Mishra's piece, a NYT web designer had misspelled Narendra Modi's name as Nirandra Modi (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/opinion/pankaj-mishra-nirandra-modis-idea-of-india.html?)

October 24, 2014

Nature rises to such resplendent luminescence in Fall. It is as if it is engaging in the last great tease before it sheds its beauteous trimmings to lure Winter.

I had been meaning to paint Fall up close and here is what happened this morning. The predominant color of Fall is a mixture of deep pink and creeping yellow. I began with a few vertical strokes of dark brown to depict some tree trunks but soon they were overtaken by just random strokes of yellow, green, red and pink. That gave me the backdrop against which I stood up the three trees. The trees that you see here were added as an afterthought as was the drying grass. Everything in this digital painting was an afterthought. Considering that, I think it turned out fairly well.

I am quite struck by the arboreal, floral and faunal intelligence in adapting to changing seasons. It also strikes me that while we humans go under layers of clothing to prepare for Winter, trees drop their cover and come down to the bare minimum.

There is a fishpond in my backyard where over a dozen fish have already begun to slow down as a prelude to hibernation. Last winter was particularly severe but they all managed to survive under a sheet of ice that lasted close to three months. They all huddle together under a rock in a communal embrace.

October 23, 2014

As an experiment I decided to watch Vishal Bharadwaj’s ‘Haider’ and Ritesh Batra’s ‘The Lunchbox’ in parallel. They both depressed me for different reasons. ‘Haider’ for its obvious despairing viciousness and ‘The Lunchbox’ for its stifling Mumbai spaces in permanent disrepair.

Having lived in Mumbai for eight years from 1981 to 1989 and having reported Kashmir for eight years from 1989 to 1997 I know both reasonably well. I have seen both from vantage points that are deeply unflattering for their much trumpeted images of urban vibrancy in the case of the former and unremitting beauty in the case of the latter. In the end, neither the urban vibrancy redeems Mumbai for me nor the unremitting beauty Kashmir. That could be partly because they are both extraneous to the lives of the protagonists.

There is no comparison between the two films at all except that I was common to both as was Irrfan Khan, who plays ‘Roohdaar’ in ‘Haider’ and Saajan Fernandes in ‘The Lunchbox’. He nails both characters with his peculiarly gentle demeanor.

I am not entirely sure if I liked the two movies with the effusion that most others seem to have. Sure, I did watch them with intermittent interest and, in the case of ‘Haider’, admired many of its frames. However, I missed the qualities that many deeply analytical reviewers saw in both. As always, I blame myself for lacking the refinement to grasp poignant subtleties of the human experience.

If I sound less than elated it is not a refection on the quality of the cinema created by Messrs. Bhardwaj and Batra but the fact that I have observed those lives rather closely. Unlike Kashmir, which I visited frequently from the very inception of the insurgency because something was going on there, Mumbai/Bombay was where I lived and where nothing strikingly newsworthy was going on other than the fact that I lived and worked there as a journalist. There was news happening in Bombay, of course, but since I lived there it had a different meaning than Kashmir whose news I was visiting.

It was weird to do back and forth between Mumbai’s less than edifying middle class existence as incidentally portrayed in ‘The Lunchbox’ and Kashmir’s ever present menace of violence, either by the Indian state or the militants, distorting its breathtaking beauty. To Bhardwaj’s credit and under the demands of the plot drawn from Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, he does a terrific job of resisting the temptation of presenting Kashmir as a perpetual tourist brochure even while ensuring that his cinematographer Pankaj Kumar captures some memorable frames of a Kashmir in trauma. Even a traumatized Kashmir looks captivating.

Kashmir in fall has has extraordinary light that tends to make everything look benign, including bombed out homes, bullet-riddled walls, sternly edgy Indian soldiers and devious and shadowy militants. I have experienced all that firsthand many times during my reporting trips. So for me the visual references were very familiar. Both the movies are polished products that represent their creators’ visions effectively. One couldn’t ask for much for in cinema.

Now that I am done with my experiment, I will wait for a few more days and watch ‘Haider’ again without looking at it with my personal references. I had already watched ‘The Lunchbox’ once before and I am done with it for now.

These experiments mean nothing to anyone other than me. From time to time, I try to test my brain’s limited capacity for human comprehension. I would grade myself at about 48 percent.

October 22, 2014

The great Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee (Photo: a Screen grab from a Newseum clip)

You couldn’t possibly be a journalist and not know at least a little bit about Ben Bradlee; even as little as that he existed. His death at 93 brings to an end the era of the quintessential daily newspaper editor. someone who always questioned everything, always remained skeptical after all the answers had been given and someone who treated news without being sentimental.

I was browsing through a few of his interview clips this morning and came across one by Newseum. In the one I have linked here the legendary Washington Post editor, who helmed the newspaper for 26 years and made it the world famous institution that it became, Bradlee talks about the circumstances under which Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the daily’s two metro reporters, got the assignment which eventually became the Watergate story. He tells us that the reason why the two young reporters got assigned to the story was because it broke on a Saturday, “when big shot reporters like their weekends off”. “That is how they got their assignment. What they did with it was something else,” he says.

It is thoroughbred professionals like Bradlee who give daily journalism that aura of integrity and historic gravitas it enjoys. The figure of the daily newspaper editor is a unique one because they sit at the center of our current life and get to view it from a perch that is unrivaled. Every time I saw Bradlee on television the first thought that came to mind was “newspaper editor.” I know of extremely few journalists who actually become who they are. Bradlee was one of those rare ones. He was a great editor and had the bearing of one.

Between the Watergate scandal, America’s defining case of political corruption that led to the ignominious downfall of President Richard Nixon, and the Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War, he transformed the Post from a metropolitan daily into a globally respected institution. Unless newspaper editors do what Ben Bradlee did with such ease, they should change their profession and join advertising or public relations or something along those lines.

There is a scene in ‘All the President’s Men’ where Bradlee, played by Jason Robards tells Woodward and Bernstein, “I can’t do the reporting for my reporters which means I have to trust them. And I hate trusting anybody.” I do not know if in real life Bradlee ever said something like that it sounds like he could have.